Coating Under Bus

[Maggie01]

Our bus is a 2002 37' International from here in Texas. When we bought it, the underneath area was solid with 18 years worth of white caliche, which is used to build the roads here in Texas. Yesterday my son decided to finally get under the bus with a water hose to clean all the caliche out, so we could see the actual underside of the bus. That stuff came out in giant white clumps, but the underside looks really good. Only thing is the underside of the bus is covered in a VERY hard coating of what looks like rock hard tar. My question is do we need to find some way to get that coating off or do we just leave it alone? We just finished getting that horrible asphatum that was beneath the insulation off the ceiling. As hard as that stuff was to finally get off, this coating under the bus looks impossible to get off. It is solid and hard as a rock. Again this is a Texas bus that only had some surface rust on the inside where a few windows leaked. We've already grinded it. Nowhere did it go through the floor.

 

[musigenesis]

If the tar undercoating is solid everywhere, just leave it be and be thankful for it. My bus has/had it but there were a lot of rust incursions into it so I've had to remove large amounts of it by physically scraping, then multiple applications of goo remover (basically solvent), mineral spirits and soap and water. It's truly awful work, you end up covered with bits of tar on your skin and your clothes (I wear the crappiest scraps I have and then throw them away afterwards).